Chapter 5c. Sacred Songs — Gospel Song

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This web version of The Singing Bourgeois: Songs of the Victorian Drawing Room and Parlor (2nd edition, 2001) appears with the permission of the author and the publishers of the print edition, Ashgate.
George P. Landow created this online version, formatting the text and adding links and images.

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Notes

Gospel song

The 1870s also saw an attempt to broaden the popular appeal of sacred song for
ideological reasons; this tendency had its origins in the Sunday School movement
and the spread of American religious revivalism, particularly the second wave of
fundamentalism which came after the Civil War. Before the Civil War, American
sacred songs divided into those sung at the 'fire and brimstone' camp meetings of
the earlier fundamentalist revival, and those with 'chaste and popular tunes' for
'family and social worship', as the contents of Thomas Hastings' edition of Sacred
Songs published by the American Tract Society in 1842 are described. There were,
in addition, collections of songs being published for Sunday School use from the
1830s onward which proved influential. The need for simplicity and directness in
these songs for children was an important ingredient of the gospel-hymn style. It was even possible for a child's hymn to end up as a full-blown drawing-room
ballad, as happened in Britain with Gounod's setting of Mrs C. F. Alexander's
hymn for 'little children' 'There Is a Green Hill Far Away' in 1871. Itinerant
preacher Dwight L. Moody (1837—99) led the post-Civil War revivalist movement. It was pervaded by a new mood, which to some extent echoed the new
mood of blackface minstrelsy: no more was the atmosphere one of hellfire and
hysteria; instead, a mixture of heavy sentiment and stirring songs of hope
prevailed. The new style can be seen emerging in hybrid hymns such as 'Oh, You
Must Be a Lover of the Lord', a song popular in revival meetings in the American
South and Mid-West. It links an Isaac Watts hymn, 'Am I a Soldier of the
Cross?', to a rousing camp-style chorus, the whole set to the same music, with no regard for the crude contrast in diction:

Am I a soldier of the cross?
A follower of the Lamb?
And shall I fear to own His cause,
Or blush to speak His name?

Oh, you must be a lover of the Lord,
Oh, you must be a lover of the Lord,
Oh, you must be a lover of the Lord,
Or you can't go to heaven when you die.

The published music of 1866 is credited to J.N.S., who almost certainly was an
arranger; it was common practice for publishers to employ house musicians to
arrange gospel hymns as separate songs with piano accompaniment. No one
knows who the arranger was of the most famous hybrid hymn, 'Battle Hymn of
the Republic'. When the sheet music was first published, by Oliver Ditson & Co.
of Boston in 1862, it carried the information that Julia Ward Howe's verses had
been 'adapted to the favourite melody of "Glory, Hallelujah".' In similar fashion
to 'Oh, You Must Be a Lover of the Lord', the poetry is crammed into an
unsuitable tune and punctuated at each stanza's end with a trite, repetitive
refrain. The tune originally accompanied G. S. Scofield's Methodist hymn 'Say,
Brothers, Will You Meet Us?' (1858), but became widely known as 'John
Brown's Body' in 1861. Songs moved back and forth between sacred and secular
versions during this period; another famous song of the Civil War, 'Tramp!
'Tramp! Tramp!' by G. F. Root, gave its melody to the Sunday School hymn
'Jesus Loves the Little Children'.

American ballad composers like G. F. Root and J. P. Webster were now taking
an terest in gospel hymns; the latter's 'Sweet By and By' (words by S. F.
Bennet) almost equalled his wartime 'Lorena' in popularity. It was originally
published in The Signet Ring (1868), a collection of hymns, but was soon made
available in a separate sheet-music version. The first large collection of gospel
hymns was compiled by Ira D. Sankey (1840-1908), who joined Moody in
Chicago in 1870. Sacred Songs and Solos was published by Morgan & Scott in London in 1873, the year Moody and Sankey made their triumphant tour of Britain. In America, Sankey collaborated with another evangelical singer, Philip Paul Bliss (1838—76), to produce Gospel Hymns and Sacred Songs, published in New
York in 1875. The compositions of Bliss typify the new sentimental style of gospel song. One of his first songs (for which, as so often, he wrote both words and
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music) was 'If Papa Were Only Ready!', a short solo which he sang to the
accompaniment of an American reed organ. The song concerns the hopes and
fears of little Willie. At this time, the name 'Willie' usually proved fatal for any
character in a song, and here is no exception; the song begins, 'I should like to die,' said Willie, 'if my papa could die too.' As well as solos, Bliss wrote fully
harmonized hymns, but the songs which are richest in the characteristics of the new gospel style are those which follow the pattern common in minstrel shows of solo verse and harmonized refrain. For example, 'What Shall the Harvest Be?'
(words by E. A. Oakley) has many typical features: a melody coloured by
sentimental chromaticism and expressive dissonance; a dancelike rhythm; and
harmony which embraces the 'modern' vocabulary of the drawing room (passing
diminished sevenths, dominant extensions, and pedals). Here is the opening of
the verse:

A favourite device used in the choral refrains of gospel songs is that of 'echo
voices', usually male voices echoing a phrase sung by female voices. In the
present song, the soprano moves through the text at a slower speed than the other
voice parts, which might more accurately be called 'anticipating voices'.

Another characteristic of gospel style, seen to some extent in this song, is the
tendency to favour parallel movement for the top three voices of a four-part
harmonization. The form of'What Shall the Harvest Be?' is more expansive than
the norm; it has a twelve-bar verse and sixteen-bar chorus, rather than eight bars
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for each. Besides the evangelical enthusiasm of their texts, it is just this compact-
ness of musical form which separates many gospel songs from songs of the
minstrel stage, not the use of anything strikingly different in their melodic,
harmonic, or rhythmic departments; a comparison of Foster's 'De Camptown
Races' and Bliss's 'Look and Live'14 shows how close together on occasion they
could come. While being infused with the sentimentality of post-Civil War song,
some of the vigour of pre-Givil War minstrelsy also seems to have passed into
gospel music. This vigour is apparent in the fondness for questions and exclamations as titles.

The texts relate to the Bible in three main ways: they may illustrate and
confirm, as happens in 'What Shall the Harvest Be?', which takes as its departure
point 'Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap' (Galatians 6:7); they
may use a Biblical quotation as a basis for personal confession, as occurs in 'The
Wandering Sheep', which quotes at its head, 'All we like sheep have gone astray'
(Isaiah 53:6), and begins, 'I was a wandering sheep, I did not love the fold'; or
they may offer individual witness to the truth of a Biblical statement, as does 'The
Sands of Time', verse 3 of which testifies to the truth of the assertion 'Thine eyes
shall behold the land that is very far off' (Isaiah 33:17):

It was Bliss and Sankey's desire that their music, and gospel music in general,
should reach into every corner of society. As mentioned before, this was born of
ideological rather than commercial reasons; they refused, in fact, to take any
personal profit out of their editing or songwriting. Revivalism was nothing new to
Britain. The Primitive Methodist church had its origins in the first English camp
meeting held at Mow Cop on the Staffordshire-Cheshire border by 'Crazy
Alonzo' Dow in 1807.15 William Booth began holding services in the open air and
in tents from 1864 onwards, although he did not create the Whitechapel Church
Mission, and with it the Salvation Army, until 1878. However, Moody and
Sankey arrived in Britain in 1873, a year of industrial crisis. The middle class nc
doubt welcomed the distraction offered to an increasingly discontent workine
class who now had the electoral franchise and had forced the Liberal government
to give full legal recognition to trade unions just a few years after an attempt to
re-enact the Combination Laws. But even in the most respectable middle-class
quarters a fervent religious strain was already to be found. In 1860 Miss Lindsay
had a notable success with her setting of Tennyson's 'Too Late!', which in parts
reads like a revivalist hymn:

The songs of P. P. Bliss certainly found their way into middle-class homes in
Britain; some of them were published separately in the Musical Bouquet, in
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arrangements by T. Westrop. In this connection, also, it is worth noting that No. 111 of Sankey's Sacred Songs and Solos, 'Farewell Hymn', is a divine parody of 'Home, Sweet Home!'